Is one of those surrendered homes the $750K house purchased with 100% financing by a non-English-speaking strawberry picker earning $14K a year?

That was fairly typical towards the end of the mania out here. We had some neighbors like that. Nice people. Only the daughters spoke English. They babysat for us. When they left they burned shit in the fireplace all night long. I thought the sparks shooting ten feet out the chimney were going to catch the whole neighborhood on fire.

Someone who owned a house near us but lived out of the country accidentally rented it to drug dealers who subsequently destroyed it. Then the bank foreclosed. The new owner has turned it into one of the nicest houses in the neighborhood.

She said that the toughest part was removing the spray paint picture of Bart Simpson captioned "El Barto" from the fireplace in the living room.

I saw these while surfing the 'net last night, and was struck at how sad the images made me. All of these houses had families in them at one time. We don't know the particular situations of each family, but the fact that all of them are now abandoned not only is bad for each family, but equally bad for each neighborhood and city in which they were located.

There's a cautionary tale here about how we do housing finance, but the fact that the houses were dreams unfulfilled...and the collateral damage done to each household is truly disheartening.

Yeah, Ken, this is clearly the fault of a guy who's been dead for years, and out of office for decades. The housing bubble was due to the "free market" as much as the debt crisis was caused by politicians saying "no."

The recession never stopped. It leveled off in a disaster, and now has resumed sinking fast into a permanent depression as the Obama Regulations and Obamacare have descended everywhere like a black cloud of economic poison.

One family in my neighborhood were so pissed off about having their home foreclosed on they took quick setting cement and poured it into every drain and toilet in their home. They then took a sledge hammer and busted every interior door in the home.

Some of these homes at least look like you could do some clean-up and have it be a home someone could move into.